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For my blogiversary: an opera commentary
I promise I will never do this again, but it’s my blogiversary, so I’m going to link to a post at my other blog. I might even cry if I want to.
A short time ago I attended the dress rehearsal of Robert Ward's The Crucible as produced by the Chautauqua Opera Company. Unlike many operas that are merely overdone glorifications of bad behavior, The Crucible is a poignant commentary on the way people respond to things they fear and how far they will go to try to preserve a sense of well-being or get what they want. In many ways it is similar to Susannah, an opera I attended at Chautauqua about a year ago and wrote about in the second post on my other blog. Both operas were written during the McCarthy era. The two productions even shared an actress in common -- Jane Ohmes -- who was excellent in both, though her roles in each were quite different from one another.
I invite you to read my blogiversary post.
I promise I will never do this again, but it’s my blogiversary, so I’m going to link to a post at my other blog.
Seriously...I've found the best blogs by following links (especially self-linked)
I enjoy your blog, keep it up!
Happy Blogiversary! Where better to celebrate than on the group blog you helped birth! Felicitations all around:)
Bonnie, feel free to link to your own blog whenever you feel there's something of interest to the readers here (including the other Ls). Double posting (i.e. copying and pasting posts from our individual blogs here and vice versa) was the only thing I "outlawed" just because I want to keep the content here unique, but linking is always welcome.
...Now to read your post, as one who's only appreciation of opera has been in two films: The Shawshank Redemption and Life is Beautiful. Les Mis doesn't count as opera, does it? That's my favorite play/musical. I've seen it twice in SF. But Phantom of the Opera (is that opera?) was too dark though I enjoyed the music.
I've never been able to get into opera for some reason. The closest I ever came to an opera was Sweeney Todd at the Met in NYC. Doesn't quite count....
The play The Crucible really irritates me, though. The 'witch-hunt' analogy only works if you believe in neither witches nor Communists.
"But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did - if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather - surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there." --C.S. Lewis
Thank you for the kind words, everyone, and thanks for clarifying the linking issue, Marla :-).
Atlantic, thanks for your interesting comment.
Where is the Lewis quote from? I’d be interested to learn the context in order to better understand what he is saying. It seems an over-generalization to say that society doesn’t believe in witches. And if it did, why would there be an assumption that such a person should be executed? If general society had enough collective perception to believe in (what are being referred to as) witches, wouldn’t it also be collectively aware that “vengeance is mine, says the Lord” (Deuteronomy 32:35, Hebrews 10:30)?.
I'm also wondering why the witch analogy would work only if one doesn’t believe in witches. I think that the The Crucible tries to show that oftentimes the real witches are the ones doing the witch-hunting. I’ve no doubt that some of the investigation during the McCarthy era was legitimate, and that some of the charges were true. But the point of the opera is to illustrate the spirit in which much of the inquiry was made. There is a tendency amongst humans to scapegoat and otherwise injustice their fellow humans, as I described in the post linked to at my other blog.
The Lewis quote is from Mere Christianity. He has just finished discussing the evidence for an inborn morality. The lead-in to the quote is “But one word before I end. I have met people who exaggerate the differences, because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, 'Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?’”
It’s certainly valid to view the point of The Crucible as criticising the spirit of both the Salem witchhunts and McCarthyism, but I know a great many people who take it as a direct analogy to the content of anti-Communism as well. That is, witches do not really exist and so the only real evil exists among the witchhunters; similarly, secret Communists do not exist, and the only real evil existed in Joe McCarthy and HUAC. At worst, ‘witches’ were flawed or unpopular people or were perfectly nice, well-meaning eccentrics who dabbled in herbalism and folk magic, the same as 'Communists' were sympathetic lefties who just wanted a better welfare safety net. I grew up a blue state and this is how it was taught in my high school.
Thanks, Atlantic. Your response helped greatly. You make an excellent point about a common error.
I don’t think the existence of this error takes away from Miller and Ward’s main purpose, though, which was to show that McCarthyism (meaning, basically, witch-hunting) does not and did not just occur with Senator McCarthy in the 1950's; it is a universal human phenomenon.
However, it’s possible that Ward (I haven’t seen Miller’s play) fails to give the Devil his due. (I would need to study the libretto to make a better determination.) It’s probably safe to say that, in his opera, real evil is attributed more to the human heart than to the Devil. Though it's obviously error to underestimate the Devil, he is right about the extent and depths of the human propensity for evil.
